We announced a call for nominations for the 2010 class of PopTech Social Innovation Fellows this week, so I edited a video to accompany the email announcement.

Typically during the PopTech conference I’m running around with the camera crew, missing all the edifying and moving moments taking place on stage, so I was excited to finally watch the 2009 Fellows’ videos in their entirety while pulling this short piece together.

Editing always involves a dance between what’s being said, where the camera was focused when the great moments took place, and how each piece fits with every other piece.

The best part of choosing the shots that wound up in the final version was realizing how many great moments happened on stage! To see all the footage, check out the full fellows’ talks.

I hope this inspires you to nominate and help us find the next class of Social Innovation Fellows!

What are your favorite moments from the Fellows’ presentations? Let us know in the comments.

Each year, Global Citizen Year (GCY) selects and trains a corps of HS grads and supports them in apprenticeships across Asia, Africa and Latin America during a bridge year before college. Our first corps of Fellows launched last fall and now we’re searching for our 2010 Fellows.

Do you know any high school seniors or educators who might be interested? Help us spread the word!

Some languages are more precise than others. German’s word for disappointment, “Enttäuschung,” for example, literally translates as “disillusion” and thus implies that the prerequisite of any disappointment is excessive (and false!) expectation. As if that needed any further evidence, Apple’s iPad presentation and President Obama’s first State of the Union address last Wednesday marked the preliminary culmination of an obvious trend: disappointment as a widespread sentiment and cultural subtext at the dawn of this young decade.

Both Apple and Obama are among the most powerful brands of our time and occupy that vexing space between hype and hope in the public mind. Both have zealous fans and followers, and enjoy an almost religious admiration. And both have now suffered a very public deflation, a humiliating erosion of their once unflappable appeal of invincibility, a painful rejection of love.

The Awl wrote about the iPad launch: “Still, I’m a little taken aback by the immediate and vocal lack of enthusiasm for the product. What does it lack? What was everyone hoping for that did not materialize? This is a very rough thought that I may or may not refine, so take it as such, but the iPad is a lot like Barack Obama: Everyone was able to project their own fantasies and aspirations on a product with which they were mostly unfamiliar, only to sour on it once they realized that it did not live up to their impossible expectations. Only with the iPad it took about seven minutes for the disappointment to set in. I don’t know what that says about our accelerated culture or how we confuse hype and excitement for the tangible realities of life, but it says something.”

And indeed, no product in the world could have lived up to the hype around the iPad: Apple as the inventor of human-friendly computing, Apple as the media company that enables the much desired super-convergence, Apple as the innovator of innovation, Apple as the savior of the ailing publishing industry, Apple as the savior of the Californian blend of optimism that is now set against the backdrop of a bankrupt state, Apple as the savior of capitalism. After the unveiling, we felt a bit like the car fan who realizes that what he was sold as the dream car of the future is in fact a convertible Ferrari. If Apple is the “Zeitgeist Company,” as my colleague Adam Richardson wrote, then our zeitgeist is the Midlife Crisis.

While the real creativity can be found on the web, where the iPad release spurred a throng of irreverent spoofs and thoughtful analyses, the actual product – ouch – is a let-down, for reasons that have been extensively addressed elsewhere and shall therefore not be restated here. At any rate, the disappointment was to be expected: For every brand that lives off of inflated expectations, things get tricky when the tangible manifestation shows signs of all-too-human imperfection. The iPad, in this sense, did not represent the “humanization of technology,” as some people waxed lyrical. Rather, it was the humanization of Apple, as the many obvious flaws made the divine brand suddenly appear sloppy, erratic, and shockingly out-of-touch with the consumer.

My colleague Robert Fabricant has already poignantly commented on the retro-futurism exhibited by the iPad, likening Steve Job’s nostalgic vision of the future to the megalomaniac naiveté of James Cameron’s Avatar. Perhaps that ‘s what’s really at the core of this recent streak of disappointments: the depressing insight that in the very moment we believe to finally have the tools and intellectual aptness to shape the future, some old-man-made visions of tomorrow’s better world betray our infinite utopian hope. Last year’s LIFT conference had a pretty good instinct for the emerging cultural climate when it chose as its theme: “Where did the future go?”

Yes, the digital joyride has come to an end. The faith in smart technology, collective knowledge, and data-driven human reasoning has suffered severe blows of late. Neither did social technology unleash the revolutionary potential of the Iranian people after the election, nor did sophisticated financial instruments prevent the financial crisis or the Copenhagen Summit yield a meaningful solution for combating the climate crisis. Wikipedia has not made us wiser; conflicts remain unresolved; ignorance prevails – in spite of the social capital accumulated on social networks, time and place-shifting transnational hyper-connectivity, and design thinking.

“The Social Web is like the Sixties,” Donovan sang at last week’s DLD conference in Munich, a gathering of the digital elite headed to Davos. That sounded good but the reality is less flowery: while the Social Web may provide a sheer endless array of possibilities, a movement it is not (in hindsight, the online activism during the Obama campaign remains a footnote of history). And with the iPad, the Social Web has been contained as a mechanism for mere consumption.

On a panel at DLD, John Brockman (Edge.org), David Gelernter (Yale), Frank Schirrmacher (arts & leisure editor of German daily FAZ), and Andrian Kreye (arts & leisure editor of German daily SZ) discussed the state of the Internet and the state of information technology overall. The mood was dark. Schirrmacher, the cultural pessimist, warned of the age of the “Informavore,” as artificial intelligence supersedes human’s ability to intellectually cope with information overload. He quoted Daniel Dennett (“We have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them”) and painted a grim picture of the future of media: With the big Internet gatekeepers (and their search algorithms) regulating attention markets, media should shift their attention to the culture of software – or it would be filtered out by that very software sooner or later. Gelernter bemoaned the lack of advances in user interfaces (“we still use the same metaphors we used twenty years ago”), and Kreye found the current Web “boring” (“the Web is like a car now; the fact that it is moving is no longer interesting. What matters is what we do with it, and where we’re going.”). Brockman finally killed the discussion altogether by wryly telling his fellow panelists that “your time is over. You are over.”

The Obama party is over, too, and the President’s State of the Union address made that palpable. Only a year after his inauguration, which many Americans celebrated as liberation, the Republican opposition flexes its muscle again, but what’s even more remarkable, Obama’s once most fervent supporters on the left show a complete lack of enthusiasm. Rational arguments fall short of explaining this phenomenon. The Obamameter by PolitiFact shows that Obama didn’t break too many campaign promises (with some notable and controversial exceptions of course). By and large, he didn’t make profound mistakes, he didn’t change course. He did take on the heavy battles and the complex challenges America is facing, as he said he would. He may have made some miscalculations as he set his first-year agenda, but fixing healthcare was the only plausible choice in the end. It is striking: a country that elected a president who had campaigned in the name of change is now rescinding its mandate for it. Conservatism is the mask of the fool who knew better all along.

The cynics have a strong ally: Disappointment is sustainable. Obama and Apple may eventually stumble over the conundrum that Thomas Hardy so aptly described: “The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.” Maybe we just enjoy seeing our gods fall from grace. Or maybe last week’s collective sigh was an expression of the enormous emotional and spiritual effort it took to close out the past decade, resulting in a fatigue that now readily converts optimism into cynicism (as in: pragmatism without principles), which has again, unfortunately, become the most powerful currency of our intellectual discourse. It remains to be seen if this is a temporary sentiment or if we have indeed entered a new era of permanent disappointment – an age of Grand Disillusion. If not even Apple honors our trust, who else is left to believe in?

In the coming months we will be selecting up to 20 Social Innovation Fellows from around the world who are incubating transformative solutions to the world’s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Nominations are particularly encouraged in the fields of healthcare, energy, water, and the arts, as well as green materials, the environment and education. Fellows will be selected based on their proven track record and their potential to generate high-impact and sustainable solutions. Check out the 2010 Call for Nominations for eligibility criteria, and see our 2008 and 2009 Fellows for great examples of what we look for.

The Social Innovation Fellows Program exemplifies PopTech’s longstanding commitment to the field of social innovation and highlights the importance of this sector in developing breakthrough solutions to some of the world’s most urgent challenges. The centerpiece of the program is an intensive, multi-day, interactive curriculum taught by a world-class faculty with expertise in areas critical to the success of “big bet” social innovations. This experience is complemented by participation in PopTech 2010, the annual convening of prominent thought leaders, influencers and policy-makers (October 20-23, Camden, ME). Our ability to deeply integrate Fellows into the broader PopTech network provides a unique opportunity to showcase work and develop deep relationships with a corps of supporters who are committed to advancing their ideas, projects and collaborations.

We need your help as part of the PopTech network to identify the Class of 2010—please nominate candidates now through the online nomination form.

Digital theorist Jaron Lanier has a new book out, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (find out more about the book in a recent WNYC interview), and he appeared at PopTech 2002 to discuss virtual reality (and play the piano!). Some excerpts from Jaron’s talk:

If you need a clear sign that new ideas are needed to save public education in Kenya, look no further than Tuesday’s announcement by U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger that the United States is suspending almost $7 million in aid to the Kenyan ministry of education until fraud in the Free Public Education program is addressed.

That seven-year-old program brought an influx of previously disenfranchised students into the national education system, but in the process created as many problems as it solved: class size rose, teacher recruitment stalled, and the program became dependent on outside donations from foreign governments and international organizations. That’s before you even reach the corruption that has siphoned off almost $1.5 million, or the program’s doubtful educational results.

A new venture called Bridge International Academies is reinventing the model for education in Kenya by taking a page from franchise-based corporations.

Father dropping off a child at a Bridge International Academy school with a “barn” style roof for air ventilation, an innovation in an area where many buildings have no windows or air vents. Credit: Bridge International Academies.

Bridge is rigorously studying and evaluating how to deliver the best quality education to Kenyan primary-school students at the lowest possible cost, but the most innovative aspect of their program is that they are examining every aspect of opening and running a school with an eye toward replication, so that new schools can be opened, many at a time, of a consistently high quality.

“Everything we do is done with the plan to scale to thousands of schools,” one of Bridge’s founders, Shannon May, told me. “Like other successful, large-network or franchise-based corporations, we are resolutely data-driven and process-oriented in order to achieve our mission. … We know of no other organization that is putting together what we call the entire school-in-a-box: all the systems and processes, from land acquisition and construction, to curriculum development and teacher training, to educational performance monitoring and evaluation, to school management training and auditing, to financing and accounting systems.

Bridge was founded in 2007 by three Americans: Jay Kimmelman, the entrepreneur behind the software company EduSoft, which helps U.S. public schools analyze student-performance data; Phil Frei, a technologist whose last venture enabled Malawian farmers to reduce the amount of wood they consumed in curing tobacco (Malawi’s chief export), thus combating deforestation; and Shannon May, an anthropologist who specializes in sustainable development. Together they have assembled a social-enterprise project that borrows techniques from business and social science to create a network of high-quality schools that remain accountable to parents.

So far, the results are promising. Three weeks ago, Bridge opened five new schools at once (they opened their first two, one at a time, in 2009), and average enrollment is already 119—a sign that parents have found reason to prefer Bridge schools to the more established private schools in the area. Early testing shows that Bridge students are substantially outperforming their peers across Nairobi in core reading and math skills. According to May, these students are even closing the achievement gap in English reading performance with students of the same age in the United States.

Rigorous evaluation, which international development projects sometimes shortchange, is a central part of Bridge’s model. (For more about how social-science analysis can make development and anti-poverty efforts more effective, watch Esther Duflo’s 2009 PopTech talk.) To measure educational and financial success, Bridge sets ideal costs for buying land and building schools, costs and schedules for hiring and training teachers and school managers (who are also hired locally), standards for teaching and teacher oversight, and standards for student performance. Bridge uses “direct instruction” to maintain a rigorous and consistent education in independently administered schools, scripting each class carefully so that, according to May, “we know exactly what is being taught at any given minute in the classroom, and exactly how it is being taught.”

Inside of a classroom with engaged students. Credit: Bridge International Academies.

To reduce corruption, Bridge runs what it calls a cashless school. All payments, incoming and outgoing, including payroll for all kinds of workers (teachers, school managers, construction workers), money for construction materials and school materials, and receipts of school fees, are made through the M-PESA mobile-phone payment system or Equity Bank. Signs in schools remind teachers and parents that Bridge employees should never ask for money, with a phone number for reporting violations. Off site, Bridge staff members use regular attendance reports to double-check that no student’s fees are diverted.

Can poor families afford these fees? A family pays 295 Kenyan shillings a month to send a child to a Bridge school. That’s less than $4, or about one day’s pay—usually the cheapest option, or among the cheapest ones, available in a given area. And relying on parents rather than outside organizations for funding makes the project more sustainable, reduces opportunities for corruption by shortening the path between funder and school, and above all, makes the schools accountable to parents above all others.

“By running [Bridge] as a for-profit, the target population is changed from a beneficiary to a customer, and in that change they gain all the power,” says May. “It is the customer that can keep us in or put us out of business. It is the customer, our parents, who are in charge, and that is exactly how we want it.”

Parents are willing to pay for their children to attend Bridge schools, says May, because just walking past the school they can see evidence of the quality of the enterprise. These signs of quality may seem modest by our standards, but they are significant: Children are in class during class time. Teachers are in class, too, and they are actively teaching. Lessons are interactive, with frequent responses from students. “From the parents’ perspective,” says May, “this means that there is never a time they walk by a classroom and see a teacher wondering what to write on the board, or confused about the correct answer to a problem, or sitting at their desk while the students ‘self-study.’”

In December, Omidyar Network gave Bridge International Academies a $1.8 million grant[updated February 1, 2010] equity investment (which will be repaid along with additional returns) to scale up its network of schools. Seven schools exist so far; in May, between five and ten more will open. After that, Bridge hopes to launch at least ten schools at a time and very quickly start launching 20 to 30 schools at a time. Within five to eight years, Bridge intends to open hundreds of schools annually and expand into other parts of Kenya and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of establishing 1,800 schools by 2015. Crystal Hutter, the investment lead for Omidyar Network, says that if the program succeeds, it could serve as a model for other parts of the world and other areas of social enterprise. -- Joshua J. Friedman is a writer in New York City. He is a former editor of The Atlantic and Boston Review.

This week, two talks from PopTech 2009 on the use of science to end poverty and to personalize medicine:

Esther Duflo, MIT economist and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab, asks why the world’s poorest people tend to stay poor. Duflo’s pioneering research applies randomized trials, used extensively in drug discovery research, to development economics.

Geneticist George Church believes that genome sequencing can bring us closer to personalized medicine. Several years ago, Church launched the Personal Genome Project, a public database that connects genes to diseases as well as physical and biological characteristics. (100,000 volunteers are expected to contribute by 2010.)

“Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist… any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.”

Two cards from the 2009 Annual Report are tacked onto a wall at the Brooklyn PopTech office, and we’re looking forward to our copy of the Report.

Two cards for the 2009 Annual Report live in the PopTech Brooklyn office.

Editor’s note: Kat Johnson is Program Coordinator for the national team at Common Ground, an organization that works to end homelessness. This is an interesting volunteer opportunity to help take data for an important purpose.

Tonight at midnight, volunteers from across the five boroughs will hit the streets to survey homeless individuals for the Department of Homeless Services’ annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (“HOPE”) count. The count creates a census of those sleeping outside, helping the City to measure progress and better align resources to move people from the street into permanent housing.

Common Ground (commonground.org ) will be coordinating the count in midtown Mahnattan, and we could use your help. Many volunteers make light work, and help to ensure that the count is as accurate as possible. Each volunteer will be on a team with at least one experienced outreach worker, and will undergo training (with coffee and snacks) before heading out.

If you’d like to join us, please email Laura Borntraeger at lborntraeger [at] commonground [dot] org to sign up, and to make sure we haven’t filled all the volunteer spots.